I’ve spent the last year and a half piecing together billionaire Peter Thiel’s decade long quest to destroy the media outlet Gawker. It was one of the most insane--and successful--secret plots in recent memory. I’ve been interested in the case since it began, but it wasn’t until I got a chance to interview both Peter Thiel, Gawker’s founder Nick Denton, Hulk Hogan, Charles Harder (the lawyer) et al that I felt I could tell the full story. The result is my newest book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

When I started researching the 25,000 pages of legal documents and conducting interviews with all the key players, I learned a lot of the most interesting details of this conspiracy were left out of all previous coverage. Like the fact the secret weapon of the case was a 26 year old man known “Mr. A.” Or the various legal tactics employed by Peter’s team. Or Thiel ‘fanning the flames’ of #Gamergate. Sorry I'm getting carried away...

I wrote this story because beyond touching on many of our most urgent issues (privacy, media, the power of money), it is a timely reminder that things are rarely as they seem on the surface. Peter would tell me in one of our interviews people look down on conspiracies because we're so cynical we no longer believe in strong claims of human agency or the individual's ability to create change (for good or bad). It's a depressing thought. At the very least, this story is a reminder that that cynicism is premature...or at least naive.

Conspiracy is my eighth book. My past books include The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and Growth Hacker Marketing. Outside writing I run a marketing agency, Brass Check, and tend to (way too many) animals on my ranch outside Austin.

I’m excited to be here today and answer whatever reddit has on its mind!

To me, this story is not just the story of a ten year revenge plot, it's really the story of all conspiracies. You know we live in this world of conspiracy theories (I happen to live in Austin, the hometown of Alex Jones) but few actual conspiracies. But any student of history knows that the world often pivots on something a few people cooked up in secret. So to me, this book was a chance to tell that larger story. The fact that Thiel was willing to go on the record and explain his process was, in my view as an author, an unprecedented chance to lay out how power really works in a way that few have been able to before. It's ironic, Gawker's informal motto was that they showed "How Things Work"--the story behind the story. But in this case, they missed what was actually happening. So did everyone in the media. What I tried to do here was step back, take judgment out of the picture, and show what went down and why. I think the book captures that, but ultimately that will be for the readers to decide.

Do you think that Thiel chose Hogan precisely because he knew that the whole "isn't this hogan sex tape gawker court room scene just hilarious" aspect would overshadow his involvement to an extend? I mean, if it was just some random dude who sued gawker over something much less spicey maybe the public story would've been all about "how things work" when it comes to the incredibly powerful

Thiel began looking for cases as early as 2011, but had trouble finding either cases that were viable or plaintiffs willing to publicly go against Gawker. But it's also important to see that from the second the rumors of the tape began to spread--in early 2012--Hogan was very public about his intention to go after anyone who published it. This was well-before Hogan and Thiel were connected. So Gawker's decision to run the tape--and we know they knew of Hogan's comments--was really the unforced error of the century. It's what put Hogan on Thiel's radar and gave him the opportunity he was looking for. There were then subsequent other cases that Thiel either explored backing or did back, in part because early on it was not so obvious that Hogan's case had legs to go all the way or that the verdict would be what it was (much of that came from more unforced errors Gawker made during depositions and the discovery process).

Hogan's involvement got the case a lot of publicity (and the right kind of publicity as well)

Hogan was very determined to actually go through with the process even though there was a very good chance that this would not work out and draw more attention to the tape even if it did work our (streisand effect and so on)

Gawker failed to hide their arrogance in court and blundered their way into actually losing everyhing

Now obviously this wasn't Thiel's only option he'd ever have but I think it's fair to say that there've been questionable decisions on both ends that were necesseray for this all to unfold to Thie's advantage.

My question: how much do you think Thiel was able to influence the acting parties (directly or not) so everything would turn out like it did? Or was he just lucky that it worked out this well

There's a line I have in the book from Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “We tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.” So I think one problem with your summary here is that you're missing just how hard it was to actually do all of that. To keep all the interests aligned, to keep Thiel's involvement secret, to find the right lawyers, to turn down the various settlements and gamble on a verdict, there were literally hundreds of hearings over various motions and issues and losing a single one of them might have taken the whole case in a different direction. Like 500x things had to go absolutely right to win. To me that's the fascinating lesson that people have missed about Thiel. They see this as a big guy picking on a little guy but the odds overwhelmingly favor media publishers, not plaintiffs (for good reason!)

You also have back up and realize that this conspiracy happened to come to a close with a single case (actually it was three cases settled together) but from what I saw and researched, Thiel had many irons in the fire. He was going to keep going until he got the right case in front of the right jury and won. Also an impressive, albeit scary lesson here.

Edit: Copying in my later response because people keep responding to this asking the same thing.

Gawker straight up refused a takedown order on a hidden camera porn video they didn't own the copyright to or have 18 USC releases. They bragged about refusing a court order to takedown the video in an article on their site. Joked about kiddie porn at trial. You want to go out of business? Because that's how you go out of business. It's a corporate Darwin awards situation.

The fact that Thiel was willing to go on the record and explain his process was, in my view as an author, an unprecedented chance to lay out how power really works in a way that few have been able to before.

The fact that Thiel was willing to go on the record and explain his process was, in my view as an author, an unprecedented chance to lay out how power really works in a way that few have been able to before

can you describe in one sentence how freaking out of your mind you were when you first found out he agreed to a full interview?

The police reports, which you can pull out from the trial documents off the website of the Pinellas County Courthouse, suspected that the tapes were leaked by a rival radio DJ Matt 'Spiceboy' Loyd. He was never charged with the crime so we should be careful about pointing fingers, but as far as a best guess goes from both the FBI and the Tampa Police, that's it. Even weirder--weirder than this entire dispute being put into motion by a fight between two shock jocks--is that the lawyer who represented the brokering of the sales of the tape was a man named Keith M. Davidson, who later came to represent Stormy Daniels after her alleged affair with the man who is now the President of the United States of America...

I believe so. When I lived in Tampa and listened to Bubba, Spiceboy was an intern working for the show. He did some stupid shit for Bubba as far as gimmicks and stunts. Remember one was jumping off a hotel balcony into the pool that ended up jacking Spice’s leg up.

From my limited knowledge of Bubba from his stint on Sirius and Howard Stern, it seems like Bubba makes a habit out of holding hard grudges. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that they had bad blood over something stupid.

I worked at the company that did the valuation for this. Where I worked determined that value of $140 M. For those that are interested, Rights of Publicity are valued based on a few different styles. For him, we relied on the change in the amount of unique user traffic that visited Gawker during the period this video was up.

I thought he would seem much more angry than he ended up seeming. I spent enough time with him that if that had been the primary motivation, I think the mask would have slipped--if only for a second. Instead, he seemed very calm, very detached, very strategic about the whole thing.

The other interesting part of Thiel's personality is that he uses the steel man technique when arguing or explaining a complicated issue. This surprised me given that he had taken to calling Gawker terrorists and such. But really, he was always very open-minded when it came to discussing things. For instance, if you ask Thiel a question—about Gawker or Trump or whatever—he doesn't just pull up some half-formed opinion. Instead, he begins with, “One view of these things is that . . . ,” and then proceeds to explain the exact opposite of what he happens to personally believe. Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion, which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox—all of it punctuated with liberal pauses to consider what he is saying as he is saying it. Even when he does describe his opinion, he prefaces it with “I tend to think . . .” or “It’s always this question of . . . ,” as if what he is about to tell you is simply capturing where his opinion falls the majority of the time when running a thought exercise on the topic, as if he is always in the process of deciding what he thinks. I found that to be very impressive and unusual. It was hard to be a lazy thinker around him.

I try to employ that kind of technique when talking about an important issue to me. Its a strong way of having real discussion and debate today, especially since we are so used to being stuck in bubbles and having to defend our own position outright

It's a good thing to do even when you're trying to make sense of a situation absent an opponent. "Everyone's the hero of their own story", as the saying I can't recall the author of goes, so if you really want to figure out why people think or do something, the best first step is to find out what angle they might have that makes them the hero of their story. It might be based on misjudgement, sure, but not many people set out to drop a deuce on the world absent any reason.

Context - 1200 is the starting rating. A decent club player is 1800. A master (FM, IM etc) is around 2300 upwards and a grand master 2500 and up. The best in the world is around 2900. There are around 1500 GMs in the entire world.

Well, most people can be good strategists when everything goes well from the beginning. The good ones will prevail when some things go wrong from the start and the real masters might even find a way to turn those shortcomings into advantages.

At the risk of sounding like a shill or whatever I've been engrossed in it since I read an article about it last week. I've been listening to the audiobook and I'm six hours in but its honestly really good.

I think one of the weirdest things I've seen was when AJ Daulerio joked around during a taped deposition about drawing the line at publishing a sex tape if the celebrity was under the age of four.

Do you get the sense that many people and institutions still shoot themselves in the foot this spectacularly on the regular? One would think with the advent of social media people would become more wary of saying completely stupid things.

Have you ever been present for one of these moments where you thought "I absolutely cannot believe I just heard that."?

There's no question that that comment, made in a deposition in late 2013, turned out to be catastrophic to Gawker three years later when the case was put in front of a juror. The chapter that I tell that story in in the book is about why you need to both know yourself and your enemy (borrowing from the concept by Sun Tzu). Gawker both had no idea the enemy they'd made in Thiel, had no real understand of how committed Hogan would be and worse, they did not understand how they might come off in court. The result was that they did and said things that came back to haunt them when their fate rested in the hands of some ordinary people in Florida.

It's still an incredibly stupid thing to say. Guaranteed that just as with every other client his attorneys had prepped him for the deposition to have an idea of what to expect. He also knew he was under oath, and that if it went to trial the jury would see that. Depositions lasting a day or more are not unusual. I can only imagine being his attorney there and shitting my pants as my client says something so outrageously inappropriate.

It was monumentally stupid and just demonstrated how little he and the others cared.

The prosecutor did not mess around. He saw the opportunity, and went at him with such ferocity, they had to take a quick recess, move the cameras off the stand, and restart the deposition. You can actually see Daulerio's soul emergency eject from his body, leaving a devastated shell of a blank-faced man behind.

how could someone obviously aware of things in the media world not understand how serious a legal deposition is. don't make jokes when in a court room or deposition and everything you are and own is on the line

I used to hang out with AJ and other young NYC writers around 10 years ago. Most of those guys were already arrogant and Gawker validated that behavior. They got away with publishing questionable shit, so why not be snarky in a deposition? That crowd was wannabe Hunter S. Thompsons, but doing a bunch of coke don't make it so.

Because the Gawker 'staff' are mentally about 15, and they perpetually lived in a world with each other where they never had to face consequences for their shittiness. They, as their personal beliefs would give away, had no grownup understanding of the real world. That dickhead was incapable of understanding how serious the situation he was in was.

He was so used to himself and his cronies being able to just make some stupid snarky comment and brush off any question or criticism, that he was completely unprepared to be legally forced to suffer consequences for his actions.

This is why this case was so satisfying for most people. Those smug assholes finally got what was coming to them, and it hurt them bad. Sweet, savory and salty.

Gawker staff was comprised of college kids supervising college kids with Denton bankrolling them. From this outsider' s view, it seems they had no veteran colleagues/journalists present to take these kids under their wing and tell them the real world isnt like college, and that they had a lot of growing up left to do.

I'm not sure I convinced them, so much as the fates aligned. I happened to get an unsolicited email from Thiel in late 2016--he had read some of my Gawker columns and suggested we get dinner sometime. I got an email from Denton not long after saying he'd read some of my philosophical writing and wanted to know if I wanted to get together. That I was talking to both of them I think was intriguing to them both, and also meant the other would want to keep talking for fear that the project might be too heavily weighted by one side. I also kept the project's direction really open for a long time--was it a book about media or technology or these two characters or was it about revenge? I really didn't know, but that allowed me to ask about a wide range of things so it never felt super invasive or "gotcha"-y. Denton preferred to do his interviews over chat, so our process was also much less of an imposition. Meanwhile, I think Thiel is quite proud of what he had accomplished and was tired of the very biased reporting around it.

“Gawker is not in the business of holding back information,” Gawker’s managing editor, Emma Carmichael, would later say in her deposition. If they got it, they ran it. A Gawker writer would defend a similar story a few years later by saying, “Stories don’t need an upside. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. If it’s true, you publish.” These people had come to believe that “truth” was the governing criterion, and that the right to publish these stories was absolute. As far as their experience was concerned, they were correct: There had never been serious consequences. They had called every bluff. They had published what every other media outlet would have deemed unpublishable and not only walked away from it—the audience loved them for it.

Of course they knew that running stolen footage of a naked person was not exactly right. Jezebel, a Gawker site, had made a name for itself defending women against every kind of slight, defending their rights to privacy, defending them against men who tried to victimize or bully them online. Jezebel would define its views more clearly in outrage over a rival blog that published a controversial story about someone’s sexuality: “Don’t out someone who doesn’t want to be out. The end. Everyone has a right to privacy. . . .” Except Peter Thiel, and now Terry Bollea, apparently.

Less than two months before the Hogan piece, a Gawker writer who would later become the site’s editor writes a piece condemning the rise of “fusking”—the practice of stealing photos from online accounts and posting them. In it, he rejects any attempt to blame the victim, or any excuses made for the “behavior of thieves and creeps” when they steal people’s private things. Gawker had seen the anger and outrage about Hunter Moore when it had written about him and his media site built around so-called revenge porn. Commenters even cheered when Gawker reported that the FBI was investigating Moore. Yet when that tape arrived to its SoHo offices, Gawker would twiddle it down to a highlight reel and run that naked video of Hulk Hogan in front of an audience that numbers in the millions—a video not just of Hogan, but also of the woman he was filmed having sex with, who also had not consented to its publication. Gawker would promote it to their Facebook fans: “It’s probably time you watched this snippet from the Hulk Hogan sex tape with a woman some claim is Bubba the Love Sponge’s wife. Work’s over. You’re fine.”

I suppose that depends on who you want to be and what kind of career you want to have. Personally, I think it's best to be really good at 3-4 distinct things. This was you have different competencies you can expand or contract based on need, the market, interest, etc. But that's still small enough to develop a solid reputation for excellence in. If you're good at 500 things (if that's even possible) it's hard for people to understand what you do.

I was in the hospital room next to John Graziano for almost a year(who was the passenger in the car that Hulks son wrecked), I saw hulk a few times and got to know the Grazianos very well...Debbie Graziano is a huge cunt & Ed was always very nice and cared deeply for his son, even though he tried to have his wife killed:/

I had no idea there was this issue going on with Maddox and Dick. I grew up a huge fan of Maddox in the early days of the internet... Even met him in person at an event in DC back in 2011... This whole story is crazy to read about though

Maddox vs Dick is one of the funniest legal dramas I've ever seen. From lawyers leaving secret insulting messages in official statements, to one of the key parts of the trial being whether or not Maddox was in fact a cuckold, it has everything it needs to be a fun read every time there's an update.

Buckle up, because you are in for a wild ride. I've followed this since it began four years ago and it's insane to think that two guys bullshitting on a podcast turned into a multimillion dollar lawsuit, restraining orders, trademark disputes, etc.

One of the narratives about the Hogan/Gawker/Thiel saga has been, in its distilled form: Since Peter Thiel's financial resources far outpaced Gawker's, he shut down the company (personally, I see it as more nuanced, but fair enough). Then the narrative goes on to talk about how dangerous this is for journalism. What's your take? Is Thiel's involvement in this case an inauspicious omen for journalism? Does Thiel himself reveal any kind of dislike for the free press? Any predictions for how this case will be impacting the media ecosystem 5-10 years from now?

The central question of this story to me is, who was the bully? Was Thiel the bully or was it Gawker? Was Peter the billionaire who destroyed a millionaire? Or was he a righteous man who attempted to use his money to solve a problem that only power and money could solve? Was it the media outlet that thoughtlessly outed a then-mostly unknown tech investor? Or was it the billionaire who spent millions plotting against him for it? Was it the website who loved to out gay men or was it the team who would back Trump in the 2016 election, and in the case of Charles Harder, write an 11 page letter threatening to sue Michael Wolff for his book about Trump? Was it Denton who never apologized, who ignored judicial orders or was it Thiel, who never showed his face until after his revenge was complete?

It depends on where you sit, but one thing that has been lost in the coverage since the verdict: Gawker thought they were winning until suddenly, they lost. It was Gawker who had filed endless motions and appeals, who had fought Hulk Hogan with scorched earth tactics, and never apologized for obtaining an illegally recorded sextape and publishing it for more than seven million people to gawk at (and then spent $10M+ vigorously insisting it was right to do so). There was a moment in mid-2014, when Gawker’s lawyers threatened Hulk Hogan, telling him that it was his last chance to drop the case before they went after him for attorney’s fees. More than anything, what the jury and the judge reacted to had been their arrogance. The verdict reflected that.

Nick Denton told me, “The idea that Thiel was terrified of the next Gawker piece is still absurd to me—and given how things turned out, we had much more to fear from him than the other way around." But it wasn’t that absurd at the time, when they were a website with hundreds of millions of readers, when Gawker was the site that had never been challenged in court and published whatever it wanted, Thiel believed that Gawker’s power was partly in pretending that it was more powerful than it was. Now that they're gone...it looks different.

As for who is the bully now? As I said, backing Trump and some of the clients Charles Harder has taken on since give me pause...but that doesn't have the power to rewrite where things were in 2007.

That plus libraries offering Hoopla/Overdrive (or similar services) has made me kick myself for having such a disastrous book habit. I love love love me some books, but I'm trying to only own books I like to read more than once.

I thought the same, tbh. I knew nothing of the conspiracy before, but the way he writes is so eloquent yet powerful, it almost makes the most minor parts of what he writes seem as interesting as the parts that are naturally juicy. I lost myself in his responses, and those were mere snippets of the full story.

t was Gawker who had filed endless motions and appeals, who had fought Hulk Hogan with scorched earth tactics, and never apologized for obtaining an illegally recorded sextape and publishing it for more than seven million people to gawk at (and then spent $10M+ vigorously insisting it was right to do so).

Really wish this one thing hadn't been lost in the coverage. I have no love for Peter Thiel or his politics, but at the end of the day, Gawker did a stupendously shitty thing, then doubled down on it, throwing their journalistic credibility right out the window. If they didn't want to get sued into oblivion, they maybe shouldn't have opened the door for it.

I can't muster sympathy for gawker. They were told by a judge that the original video was too much and they could report on the issue but not invade a man's privacy like that. All other sites conformed to the court order. But gawker defied it thinking they had the right to show a man that hadn't consented to a sex tape being public.

I started out with very strong opinions (I'd written about Gawker in my first book, Trust Me I'm Lying and also in my Observer column). I'd also been attacked by Gawker several times and the subject of some preposterously inaccurate stories. So I actually went into the book with a bit of a bias, but I found myself considerably softened talking to Nick, talking to A.J, reading what many of the writers wrote in their eulogies of the site. What I tried to do in the book ultimately was remove judgement as much as possible and just show what happened. I think that's a more important lesson.

Whether Gawker deserved what happened to it doesn't change what actually happened and to me that's where there is something to learn. How did Thiel do this? What were his motivations? How did no one suspect it as it was happening? Why was Gawker unable to fend him off? How did Gawker actually work as a company? What were its motivations for publishing the story? Why has the coverage since been so slanted in their favor since losing? Those were the questions I tried to answer.

I would say their hubris was immense, and a large reason for their downfall. Whether they should have run the tape is one discussion, but how I think for many years they did not take the case seriously--assuming that Hogan would settle, that he was an idiot, that people were on Gawker's side. Their decision in 2013 to ignore the judge's order to remove the article (though it was later overturned) was probably the height of that hubris, along with the comments made during the depositions in late 2013, which you referenced. Part of that aggressive exterior may have been motivated by internal insecurity. If you apologize, admit weakness, even admit wrong doing and you're an outlet that publishes first and verifies second, that puts a big target on your back.

I mean a few pages into Marcus's Meditations he congratulates himself for never laying a hand on his female slaves (that is rape them) so that's a pretty good reminder that these guys lived in a different culture. Rome was a dark, violent, twisted place. We can't forget that while some aspects of their lives were shockingly identical to ours--almost as if no time has passed--others are just insanely incomprehensible. I believe the punishment for parricide in Rome (killing your parents) was they would put you in a thick leather sack with a dog, a cat, a snake and a monkey and then throw you in a river to drown and be clawed to death.

I believe the punishment for parricide in Rome (killing your parents) was they would put you in a thick leather sack with a dog, a cat, a snake and a monkey and then throw you in a river to drown and be clawed to death.

I wonder how easy it was to get hold of those things in ancient Rome? And if so, were they acquired specifically for that punishment?

The weirdest part of all this was the judge allowing Hulk Hogan to wear his bandana. What kind of legal ramifications did this have? How can a fictional character(WWF Hulk Hogan) sue? FYI I'm glad he won.

Hey Ryan, how do you think Gawker's hypocrisy at the time possibly influenced the court case? An example I have is Gawker media sites condemning sites for hosting J-Law nude photos, yet posting on their site that they were defying the judge order to take down Hogan's tape. You researched all the legal docs and did interviews, did that ever come up?

She's ex-Gizmodo, which was a Gawker property (and is now the holding company of Univision for the surviving non-toxic assets).

Many of the old Gawker Media staff are still extremely angry about this and believe that they and Denton did utterly nothing wrong during his reign. Probably the most infamous post by a number of staff reflecting this attitude was during the Geithner debacle, when their concern wasn't what led to a particularly ill-researched and sickening article outing him which got shredded by outside observers and commentators - but that corporate had dared to interfere with their journalism and take it down.

Don't remember off the top of my head if she was part of that, but wouldn't surprise me.

That Geithner story and the subsequent doubling down by the staff when it was pulled was one of the most WTF things I've ever read.

I'll admit I read Gawker more than a few times in the past and I thought everyone over there and on the internet was kind of in on the joke concerning their "journalist integrity" (especially with AJs antics at Deadspin concerning a certain quarterbacks dick pics). Like the WWE isn't real wrestling, Gawker wasn't real journalism and everyone knew it but we all played along in a wink wink, nudge nudge kind of way.

When they penned that open letter after that disaster of a story was pulled I kind of sat back in my chair and said to myself; huh, they...they actually think they're journalist, doing real journalism. That's, well that's just plain delusional.

That's the moment I knew they were going to get drawn and quartered by Thiel eventually.

I loved Gawker and read it regularly. But the Geithner episode really left me angry. I read the original article (before they took it down) and was disgusted with it as were the vast majority of readers. But the way Gawker staff defended the article, and then threw a temper tantrum about it being taken down. They acted like taking down the article (which was completely uninteresting because it mostly revolves around the escort and how much they paid him) was an affront to journalism and they were Edward R Morrow standing up to tyranny.

It really showed quite a disconnect between Gawker staff and it’s readers. Also, Jezebel’s reaction (they didn’t talk about the article itself, only the decision to take it down) was so hypocritical.

As someone who generally avoided Gawker like the plague but was active on other sites in the network, that was one of the few articles I did read on it and was appalled. I wasn't even particularly surprised that the Gawker staff closed ranks after.

But what really shocked me were the senior folks on the other sites who signed off on the article stating their outrage at its removal, which was just an eyeopener about the rot throughout. Don't think that's changed much.

It's always been about page views (and the deals) for them driving the advertising dollars, though, so once you realize that your comments are part of that formula it puts a different light on the whole thing.

I am consistently dumbfounded at how media figures -- especially tech ones -- talk to and about their colleagues, readers, and just human beings in general on twitter without ever suffering any career or personal consequences. Constantly.

It's like someone road raging inside their car, except every horrible thought is intentionally broadcast publicly. At a glance, these people look totally unemployable until you see stuff like "Writes for: Mashable, Wired, etc." in their bio.

As Thiel said—and perhaps only Thiel could have said with a straight face—Hogan ‘was only a single digit millionaire.’ This case took roughly four years and cost more than $10 million to litigate. Three years in Hogan lost his endorsement deals and was kicked out of wrestling when his racist comments were leaked. There was no way he could have taken this to a jury on his own. Maybe without Thiel’s help there could have been a low six figure settlement (as Gawker had done in another case) but no jury verdict in my opinion.

One of the things I explored in the book was why we seem to have this aversion these days to secrecy. A lot of people have said, "Why didn't Peter go public with what he was doing?" The other way to think about that is why the fuck should he have to? This idea that you have to tweet about every thought you have, or write a press release about every opinion or place is not only a ridiculous feature of our social media age, but it's bad strategy! Gawker wanted Thiel to have to expose himself so they could have been better prepared to fight him in court about it. The line from Napoleon is "Never do what your enemy wants you to do for the reason they want you to do it." If you were plotting to get Trump impeached, should you have to give him a heads up?

The other reason is I think we see few conspiracies is related to the first point. People are afraid to get their hands dirty. They like signing petitions, walking in marches, changing their Facebook profile picture in solidarity...but real change is often brought about by nasty means. Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Acts...but he was a corrupt asshole. He also knew how power worked and how to wield it. Part of the reason I wanted to write the book was to show how conspiracies work, and how they can be used for good and for bad.

The truth is all of Stoicism is easy to say, difficult to practice. I think one of the harder ones for me is just not letting my temper or my impulse to react drive my behavior. To me, the Stoic is someone who is deliberate about what they do and say, just part of my personality is to be intense and always do, do, doing. Someone says something, I want to respond. There's an opportunity, I want to take it. There's something that needs to be fixed, I want to fix it. Someone makes an argument, I want to argue back. The problem there is that I'd be better off if I paused and really thought about the best response or whether a response was necessary or not. I would save myself trouble, heartache, frustration, etc if I could do this better. When I look at my journal entries, I tend to find this issue--or something related to it--is central to most of what I am struggling with or having problems with.

This is something that I also struggled with for a long time. Applying Carl Jung's quote, "until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" to my everyday life helped me stop reacting, and start choosing.

You're not a journalist, yet you wrote in this investigative report in your typical style drawing from history/prior works. Did you ever feel you were stretching to craft a narrative, for example seeing the book on ancient strategy on Theil's desk? Or were their things said in the interviews that lent themselves to the way you crafted the "story?'

It really was insane to see Discourses on Livy on Thiel's shelf in his apartment (not his desk), given that I had just read it as research for the book. And for him to be able to reference the section from memory was just one of those things that made this feel somewhat meant to be. The other funny anecdote is that he gave me a copy of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World thinking it was this obscure text that would make me realize what he had tried to do...and it happened that I'd already read it a few years before and had recently pulled my notes from it to see where there might be some insights for this book.

As for stretching to craft a narrative, I would say that the weird thing about the book was that there was actually too much material so instead of stretching the difficulty (or the shaping) came more from what not to include. A question above asked about who leaked the tapes, my decision to make this book about a conspiracies meant that the leakers identity was a lot less important, so it was left on the cutting room floor.

Your question is good though. Authors, journalists, lawyers--we're all telling stories and stories require choices and as a result certain things are obscured or emphasized to the reader. But I think this is better than say me dumping all the legal documents on you and saying: You figure it out. I mean, that's what I'm being paid to do.

Ryan - I enjoyed two of your other books (Obstacle and Ego). One piece of constructive criticism I would have is that when you create the audio book, could you consider getting a professional book reader? I don't want to sound like a dick or anything, but the hardest part of the Audiobooks for me was that your voice was kind of... monotone-ish.

For what it's worth, I too prefer when you read. It's much more personal and there's been several times the way you specifically deliver a line gives it a much truer meaning than what would have been interpreted otherwise.

Well when rumors began to fly that someone was back Hogan, there were a few candidates. I don't know if Apple was one of them, but Denton briefly considered the possibility that the Church of Scientology was responsible.